Our CryoVenom R9 290 arrived in the limited-edition wooden crate you saw on the previous page. VisionTek tells us that this could eventually become part of a collector's edition of the board with some additional accessories. However, you should expect the card you buy to show up in a cardboard box instead.

VisionTek uses the acrylic-covered version of EK’s FC R9-290X to show off its nickel-plated copper base. What you get is slightly pricier and more corrosion-resistant than its bare-copper sibling. This also gives VisionTek the perfect place for its logo.

EK’s aluminum back cover is also emblazoned with VisionTek branding.

We appreciate that EK does a good job building single-slot coolers. But the Radeon R9 290 itself still requires a dual-slot form factor to expose its second DVI output.

Effective overclocking is one of the reasons you'd want the liquid-cooled CryoVenom R9 290. There are, of course, overclockable air-cooled cards as well; you simply have to crank their fans up in order to exploit their higher frequency ceilings. VisionTek's CryoVenom R9 290 carries over AMD's reference 947 MHz core clock rate with DDR3-5000 memory. It's up to us to figure out how far Hawaii can be pushed manually.
- Can A Liquid-Cooled Radeon R9 290 Be Affordable?
- CryoVenom R9 290: Meet The Card
- Test Hardware And Benchmark Settings
- Overclocking
- Results: 3DMark
- Results: Tomb Raider And F1 2012
- Results: Arma 3
- Results: Battlefield 4
- Results: Far Cry 3
- Results: Metro: Last Light
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Making A Value Case For Water-Cooling A GPU
Go look at the price of the acrylic/nickel block and the backplate. Assume they're stockpiling the leftover air coolers at some cost and will sell them in the far future for about the cost of stockpiling them.
AMD recently released these to distribution by manufacturing partners, so maybe they can now get them bare. But they couldn't when these were launched, and this is a launch card. Since I don't know the full details of AMD's recent move, I cannot comment further.
In the USA and Canada, MSI and XFX still allow owners of their cards to install aftermarket cooling solutions WITHOUT voiding the original manufacturer's warranty. (Both have supported doing so for many years.) Should the owner of an MSI or XFX card with an aftermarket cooler installed on it ever need service for that card, the original-equipment cooling solution must be reinstalled prior to returning it for service.
XFX offers a 2-year warranty on its regular R9-series cards, and a lifetime warranty on Black Edition cards. Meanwhile, MSI offers a 3-year warranty on all its R9-series cards. So should the owner of an MSI or XFX R9-290/290X card want to use the EK solution mentioned in the article, that owner would still be fully covered by the respective manufacturer's warranty.
Do you have links? I wish I'd known about MSI and XFX's exceptional policies, I would turn to them for more samples!
Actually AMD designs the cards, and TSMC manufactures the GPUs which the distributors, Sapphire included, buy the add their heatsinks and branding to.